Total Pageviews

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Bolognese alla Gakkai

Let us start with cause and effect and let us end there too. Let us also talk about change. Let us say we want to cause an effect (goal). I’ll pick an effect. You are a manager of a large and busy restaurant so lets introduce a memorable spaghetti sauce alla bolognese. The goal is a delicious bolognese sauce. For those who don’t know, a bolognese sauce is a garlicky, tomatoey, thick meat sauce with a touch of cream. To make a memorable sauce, first of all we have to start with the finest ingredients: Vine ripened plum tomatoes, fresh garlic, a ground meat mixture of the finest beef and sausage. Fresh mushrooms, peppers, onions. Carrots for sweetness. Fresh picked bay leaves, oregano, rosemary, parsley, kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. Extra virgin olive oil, sweet cream, and the finest cooking wine. A grating of truffles.

We saute the garlic in the olive oil till just before it turns brown, then we add the peppers, onions, mushrooms and carrots and in a separate pan we brown the meat in a little olive oil. While the meat is browning we add our spices to the vegetable saute and then, in a minute or two we add the peeled tomatoes and cooking wine. We turn down the heat a bit and add the golden browned meat mixture. We stir the sauce with a wooden spoon every fifteen minutes for the next 6 or 7 hours and add a little more wine and water to achieve a slow reduction. We add the cream and the grated truffle mixture, and continue to stir every fifteen minutes for another hour or two. at the same time we are preparing the home made paste. Boil the water and put the home made pasta in the boiling water for 3 minutes. We drain every drop of water from the pasta, add butter and pour our magnifico sauce over the spaghetti. Finally we add the grated aged cheese, a mixture of parmagiana and Romano cheese from Parma Italy. We pour ourselves a glass of Barolo and we go to town while sopping up the sauce in fresh baked Italian bread.

We have made a meal to die for. We have followed the recipe of the masters of Italian cooking.

Now I give you another scenario. We take Delmonte stewed tomatoes, garlic salt, a ground meat mixture of possum and raccoon, mushrooms, carrots, onions, etc. that have been lying in the refrigerator for two months, throw it all into liquefied Crisco lard, add Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty a touch of tobasco sauce, and buttermilk and stir for fifteen or twenty minutes. Put it over overcooked Ronzoni Spaghetti and add some grated Velveeta cheese. You call this “Bolognese” sauce. You accompany the meal with white bread and beer that has been opened three days ago.

You can not separate the means from the ends when even making a meal. How can you separate the means from the ends when revealing Buddhahood and realizing Kosen Rufu? What the SGI has done to Nichiren Lotus Sutra Buddhism is to make it virtually unrecognizable to the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and protective deities throughout the universe. Although it contains, tomatoes [SGI twisted Daimoku], meat [rancid SGI Gohonzons], and inferior cheese and spices [SGI doctrines], it is hardly Nichiren Daishonin's recipe. You may call both bolognese sauce [Lotus Sutra Buddhism] but the Buddhas and bodhisattvas can tell the difference. There is no possibility of attaining Buddhahood or Kosen Rufu with a recipe that so dramatically differs from Nichiren Daishonin's. Even were you to add fine ingredients to the slop you created, it would be unfit for human or heavenly consumption.